Episode 17: For this episode, I spoke with a local Hmong shaman about his journey to becoming a master shaman, balancing his spiritual duties while living in modern times, and an upcoming film called Modern Shaman. The music throughout this episode is the instrumental music of “Me Nyuam Hmoob” by Chuefeng Yang.
Guests: Billy Lor
Yoko Vue: Hello everyone, welcome back to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. My name is Yoko Vue and this will be my last episode as the storyteller intern for Asian American Organizing Project. Thank you so much for listening for the past couple of months while I got to share some really amazing issues with you all. Today, I’ll be ending on a topic that’s close to home.
Growing up in a traditional Hmong household, I was always wearing strings around my wrist or ankles. The most common is a red string and it was usually braided. Last year I came across a post from Hey Billy that detailed the strings, how to tie one onto someone else, and the different types of strings. Billy Lor has been sharing his knowledge as a shaman, or txiv neeb, through social media for almost two years but he’s been practicing for 10 years. I learned a lot from Billy and I hope you’ll be able to take a thing or two away from our conversation.
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Yoko: I want to start off by exploring the role of a shaman and why someone would seek out their help. From my understanding, shamans are spiritual healers of the Hmong community. They can provide their insight on why someone is sick, and the problem usually involves one’s spirit. Once the problem is identified, they’ll perform a ceremony or ritual.
Billy: They wear so many hats in the community, but I would say what’s most crucial about shamans is that shamans, at times, are pillars of light. They’re the healers in the community. When people are sick, they come to us. Even when they are in times of, they’re in dark times they’ll come to you. So it doesn’t always revolve around illnesses and so you saw, it’s kind of what I spoke on earlier. Even in my firsthand experiences as a shaman, families who are sick and ill you’re going to advise them and go in– some of the people I work with, they’re also getting their medical tests done. And so I’m constantly in communication with them, with their doctor, you’re right in the middle of it. And so you play– and the reason why you’re kind of like light is because you play the role of sometimes I even say a therapist. You reassure people you give them hope you and many times you deal with a lot of other things. As a shaman you’re also a holder of cultural knowledge. So many folks may come to you just for that information.
Yoko: And they do so much more. Billy himself grew up in a Christain family; however, his family always knew someone would become a shaman.
Billy: And that was because my family is, specifically in our bloodline, we’ve had many shamans and my family is very well known for having shamans in the family. And all the shamans who have existed were in my grandpa’s generation. But what happens in the family is that if the grandparent’s generation are shamans then the kids, or my parent’s generation, none of them will receive it and the grandkids will get it. And so, not every family is like that.
Yoko: This wasn’t surprising to me because I was also told that it skipped a generation. Usually, there are signs that indicate that one may become a shaman.
Billy: But what really gave us the sign was that I got sick when I was younger as a child. And I mean, it was a mix of physical sickness, mental health. But most memorable for me and most painful, I would say was the physical illness that came with it. And I wasn’t getting any better. And we sought out a lot of different forms of medicine– a diverse set of remedies and nothing helped me. And so we finally decided to go back and seek out a shaman to look into me after three or four years of being sick. So I’m glad that we did, and then everyone who looked into me said I was going to become a shaman. Multiple shamans would say that, and eventually, then they made me take– it’s called [speaks in Hmong] And this is to test if you’re going to become a shaman in which they make you perform a ceremony and hit the gong and see if you can go into a trance and once you do, then you become a shaman. And so then I went into the trance and it was crazy I would say that overall and that led me here.
Yoko: Billy’s parents didn’t want him to be a shaman being Christain themselves but also knowing how much work it would be. That resistance wasn’t just from his parents either.
Billy: I remember crying and arguing with them. Because I was like, this is not– I’m not going to go down this path. This is not for me, this is– I don’t think this is real, right? This is very just abnormal. And so there was so much resistance.
Yoko: The physical pain Billy mentioned was joint pain; he couldn’t even hold a spoon or write with a pencil.
Billy: But after I took that test, I would say I was healed. And I came home and I ran up and down my stairs going upstairs and downstairs because I was like, “Holy crap, I can run like it’s amazing.” And it was because I was I felt better. And when you’ve gone through so much when trying to find different remedies, trying to find different sources of medicine to help you and finally, you finally have hit it and you’re finally good. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to that. If accepting shamanism and not just shaman, but accepting my spiritual duties, I would say, if that is what I have to do then I’ll do it. And it really sounds like oh my god you gave in three spirits. It’s like no, I learned how to balance. I learned how to balance myself. And so that’s how I became to accept it.
Yoko: After many years, there’s still some resistance.
Billy: We live in a country where being a shaman is not sustainable. I don’t get paid being a shaman. I can’t live off of it. [At] the same time we live in a country at times where diversity isn’t that celebrated. And so it’s not easy, socially to be a shaman as well. So there’s still resistance but I’ve come to be proud of what I do so it’s not too hard anymore.
Yoko: This young boy who didn’t really speak Hmong became a fully-fledged shaman who was performing weekend after weekend.
Billy: I’m now delegating tasks, being the main person who was controlling, or in a way, in control of what happened that day. If I say we need to hu plig, we’re gonna hu plig. If I need this thing, you need to get it to me. And it was a culture shock because I stepped into a role that we’ve only seen as Hmong Americans, we see our elders step into it. But being in that role, gave me a whole new perspective that I was bombarded with tons of detailed information. And it was a culture shock because I was learning so much about my own culture that was foreign to me.
Yoko: Being a shaman while also a teenager was challenging and Billy had to adjust quickly.
Billy: Not only that, but I was still in high school at this time. So you have this person who is going through their teenage years. So I took the test my sophomore year and so by junior year, I was a full-fledged shaman. I was going throughout the whole community and it was difficult because I’m trying to learn, I’m trying to do my study, preparing for college, ACT that’s all your junior year. At the same time you’re learning how to be a shaman. You’re having to be a community leader where you’re going around people’s houses and helping them out. You’re making a lot of the big life decisions for people and so you mature quickly and when I got into college, I realized that I had a growth stunt because I never got to live out my adolescence and be a child and live life. Once I graduated college, which was only a year ago, I could say I finally started using proactive balancing of my life, but it has never been easy balancing it and I wouldn’t even say now, I’m learning to balance it. I haven’t learned completely yet. But we’re getting there.
Yoko: While I understand a little bit about what a shaman does, I wanted to know from Billy what it’s like for him.
Billy: Yeah, I mean, a shaman is rigorous. One, it’s physically demanding. I have to make sure I stay in shape. I go on runs, I hit the gym and you have to because I mean you’re performing eight, nine hour ceremonies a time much more rare. But your averaging, every time you go on a trance, it’s three or four hours. And many times, even this summer itself, almost every Saturday, I have two to three ceremonies a day. And so you pile it up. Let’s say I have two ceremonies, one was four hours, one was five hours, I’m topping nine hours of straight cardio. And when you’re going to trance, you’re nonstop going and so you need to stay healthy. It’s very time-consuming. If you’re a shaman, you don’t get weakened. So weekends are not for you to rest. And so it’s rigorous in that.
Yoko: Having support is essential and for Billy, that came from loved ones.
Billy: And these are my siblings, my family, my friends, other folks in the community and everyone I meet. What has really helped me was that sometimes, as a shaman, we– it’s ingrained in us in our teachings that we commit ourselves to the community. I joke that shamans become public property and we’re constantly meeting the needs of the community. But it’s good to have loved ones who see you as– see me as Billy, who doesn’t use the title of shaman, and who understand that you’re human first. It’s hard to bring yourself down or ground yourself, when you’re engraved to give yourself to the community. And so having those people say, “Hey, you’re just human, you’re Billy, you should take some time to relax, you should live a little bit,” and having these loved ones lecture me to chill down, to love myself, take care of myself, this is what grounds me the most.
Yoko: On top of everything Billy is already doing, he started offering online classes for people who were interested in learning the fundamentals of traditional Hmong beliefs and customs.
Billy: It stemmed from my childhood. My mother was a very smart individual, but like many of our Hmong women, they’re gatekept out of knowledge, out of information. And I remember after my parent’s divorce, and clan disowning, and all of that detail. My mom’s said I’m just a woman, I can’t learn anything, I don’t have the opportunity to. And a quote that’s still stuck me to this da,y she would tell everyone, all my sisters and everyone around her, If I die, I never want to be a woman again. Being a woman is so hard. Like you lose– koj swb txhua yam, you’re born to lose and you don’t get access to information to opportunities like men do. And so she like, I never want to feel like this again. And I didn’t see that in a good way. That made me reflect on what does the community need to do? What are small things we can start to do? What can I do to leverage my platform as a shaman? What can I do to leverage the intellectual wealth of knowledge that I have? Am I just gonna keep it to myself? Or am I going to be a snake and infiltrate the patriarchy, take that knowledge and bring it back to our Hmong queer, our Hmong women?
Yoko: This first cohort, specifically for Hmong women, started in early March of this year.
Billy: It was just for Hmong women, because I wanted to give them the space to learn just like how our men do. And our elders are not open to teaching women and so I opened that up. And I realized, after the first class it went so well, it was so empowering. And there’s so many who were learning and to see them take it beyond the course and practice it into their daily lives. To see how we create a sisterhood through that talk and it felt good to be a resource. It felt good to be a resource.
Yoko: Although there are shamans who are women, the average Hmong woman doesn’t have the vast knowledge that someone like Billy would. And it’s a bit looked down upon to pass down this knowledge to women.
Billy: The only very negative reaction I’ve received was actually for the Hmong women’s class. That one got a lot of criticizing of like “You shouldn’t be teaching women this. This is only for men,” or “Why are you leaving men out of the picture? Why is it just for women?” So these were the comments I got a lot of. Messages of people were like you’re a fake practitioner in the community, you don’t know what you’re doing because you’re deciding to choose to teach Hmong women and Hmong queer. Acknowledging that queer people exist in our spiritual spectrum. They exist in our cosmos. Acknowledging that queer people are people. In my classes, I teach about queer spirituality cause you have to talk about the non-binary that our spirits have always been for hundreds of years. We don’t have the definitions in there but when I teach about it, oh god I do receive a lot of backlash. And so I would say the negative reaction comes a lot from our patriarchy. A lot of negative reactions, but then when I keep it open for everyone it’s always very positive. When it comes to Hmong women and Hmong queer, that is when I get ridiculed a lot and insults and even mockery of the things I do.
Yoko: Since then, the online courses have continued and opened to a wider audience.
Billy: So my next class, actually, tomorrow is my first day. It’s my everyday class. And this is a new class I’m introducing. The class I always taught was a basic understanding of fundamentals. But in this class, we’re going to teach teach for two or three months, and we’re going to teach how to do a soul calling how to hu plig, and teach them the basic skills that they need to incorporate in their lives. The reason why I’m starting this one up was because the young parents who asked me to help them out, it’s because we are becoming our parents. Our parents are becoming our grandparents. We have kids now. And our kids need these healings, our kids need this protection. Who’s going to do it? And it’s our turn. And so these young parents and young parents, meaning their 40s, 30s, 20s are looking for these tools. And sadly, a lot of these resources have died out.
Yoko: I asked Billy to elaborate on the non-binary part because I’ve never really heard about this before.
Billy: And so when we talk about queerness and we have to look at queerness from a different lens of not– one, not romanticizing it, and two, the most important, is not sexualizing it. We must step away from that. So the reason why I like to address that is because in the Hmong culture, the spirit, the soul itself is non-binary, the soul itself is a mix of feminine energy, masculine energy, naturistic energy. And so we’ll talk about like, plig niam, plig txiv, plis tub, plig ____. Koj muaj tag nrho (You have it all). And so those are all different forms of masculinity and femininity. And so the spirit itself is non-binary, the spirit itself is encompassing of that.
Yoko: A specific example Billy shared is within a traditional song that’s sung at a funeral after a soul release.
Billy: But in the song it talks about how the spirit, the grandpa’s spirit or the grandma, or anyone, how their spirit when it wakes up, it’s not just a male or female. It’s male and female and they converse and they talk about how we need to move on. And so if we ourselves are both male and female, spiritually, then we must not be hypocritical and be homophobic. Especially we cannot be transphobic when our spirit itself is both male and female. It just doesn’t make sense. And this is the argument that I use to help our elders understand what queerness is, to help them to understand what being gay is because they understand so clearly that the spirit is masculine and feminine. They understand that the spirit is even snake, is even frog, is even bamboo, and tree. So we’re everything, we’re animistic beliefs. We believe we’re tethered to everything. Everything is connected, nature, all energies, feminine, masculine and so it’s embedded in all our culture, we practice non-binary belief for hundreds of thousands of years, but then we somehow can’t fathom the idea of queerness.
Yoko: Billy is living the life of a modern shaman, which is actually the title of an upcoming film. Modern Shaman is a dark dramedy that was created and written by Gregory Yang. Filming began in early September, and Billy has been a cultural consultant for this film.
Billy: I wanted shamanism to be explored creatively. I want them to explore it artistically. And a lot of times when it is explored artistically or creatively it’s explored through horror genre, scary genre. Our younger generation we see shamanism through– we have a good lens on it, but it’s always correlated to horror, to scariness, to unknown. But when our elders see it, they see it as natural, typical, fun and sp I wanted to bring both lense in as the cultural consultant and make the film– I wanted to make sure we have a good representation of Hmong culture but also allow us to be creative and artistic with our beliefs and see it on the big screen outside of just documentaries because representation really matters. If I grew up and I saw a show like Supernatural but they had different shamans, their abilities, different heavens, there’s a whole story. There’s fighting and action and love, if I saw that growing up, I would have looked at shamanism very differently.
Yoko: Billy hopes that this film will help other young shamans who may be struggling on their journey.
Billy: This story talks about a modern shaman struggling with balancing life; being a shaman at the same time chasing your dreams. And I can relate to that. And so many people might oh my god, you don’t even know, so many young shamans going through this right now. And film is so powerful. Film itself is so powerful. And I think it will really help other young shamans to feel like it’s relatable but also teach them that you can have fun with it. And I think that’s something that people need to do. Because when I jumped into this, being a shaman, it was all fear and unknown and all that. But why I became such a proficient shaman is because I learned how to have fun with it. I joke around being a shaman all the time honestly.
Yoko: Though the life of a shaman is rigorous, there are some really wholesome moments that are unforgettable.
Billy: One moment, I would say that has been very memorable for me was… there was an individual who, I’m not gonna disclose any names, but they were sick for a very long time. And I mean, we didn’t think it was anything spiritual at all. We were doing a ceremony to prepare them for the treatment they were going to receive. And I did a ceremony, and I just got this hunch. This is probably the only time where I kind of question I would say Western medicine, not questioning it, but giving another option. You know, they were diagnosed with a certain disease. And I was like, “Alright, well, you’re gonna go to treatment. Let’s do a ceremony to prepare you spiritually. So when you go in, you’re going in with a whole heart,” And that’s really what shamans will do for that. Because we understand that, I can’t help you with that. I’ll help you spiritually to prepare you for that treatment. I did the ceremony, the pre-ceremony, ua neeb saib, I looked into the individual and I was like, this physical illness you have it’s just a manifestation of a spiritual conflict that we need to resolve.
Yoko: Billy had a gut feeling that he couldn’t ignore and with only a few days until the treatment, they decided to move forward with a different ceremony from what was originally planned.
Billy: I did the ceremony and finished it off. And then that Monday, they went in. They went in for their service, for the treatment. And then they were sent out and I got a phone call. And the individual was crying on the other end. And the first thing I thought was “Crap, they probably got the worst news of their life. Oh my gosh.” And I was like, “Are you okay?” And this person is an elder in the community. So I was talking to him, and he was like, “Hey ____. I went in, and lawv kuaj, and they didn’t see my illness. They didn’t see– it was gone, it vanished. I’m still in the hospital; they’re doing more tests, even they can’t believe it, but I’m cured. I battled this shit, this thing for years, and I’m cured.” And he just cried and that was one of those moments where it really makes you appreciate the healing, appreciate the art of what our ancestors have done for hundreds of years. It makes you realize that, although there’s so many times you don’t want to be a shaman. There’s so many times where I could be doing something else, instead of going around people’s houses. It’s those moments that remind you of your work, that what you do matters and I can’t heal everyone. I’m not a savior, I’m just going to try my best. Oh god the bright smiles that people have when they are healed. And that was one of the most memorable moments where I took the time and I just kind of– I hung up the phone and I just I was walking to campus and I just took that time to be mindful in that walk and just really appreciated what life is. And that is the small things that matter.
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Billy: Personally, for me as a shaman it reminded me that this is why I’m here. And this is why I’m a shaman. And so very memorable. changed my whole perspective on what shamanism is. And at that time, I hated being a shaman. And so that taught me to learn to appreciate it and love it again, and continue practicing.
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Yoko: Despite the rough journey to get to where he is now, Billy continues to give. With many goals for the future, including writing a book, he’s making moves one step at a time. Special thank you to Billy Lor for being my last guest. Thank you to the listeners for tuning in as I hosted New Narratives. It has been a pleasure speaking with every guest and bringing you really important stories.
This episode is written, edited, and produced by your host Yoko Vue, Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Thank you for listening!